Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  Joe’s report was more concise. “The cooking is through the fucking roof.”

  We were at the bar, the flattop, sauté pans, and fryer in front of us, every ingredient on view. The kitchen was cramped and smoky, and the restaurant felt crowded with fewer than a dozen people. We ate all the dishes on the menu, thirty items, and because the food was so good we ate many of them again. Eventually we got off our stools and sat in a corner of a restaurant on a corner, surrounded by big glass windows, Washington Irving’s eighteenth-century brownstone just across the street, the sidewalks busy with people, the city at night. Someone opened a magnum. At that moment, there was nowhere else I wanted to be. Andy would call his restaurant Casa Mono, the Monkey House. He was now a chef.

  18

  WHAT WOULD BABBO be like without Andy? At the very least, what happened next would test the widespread practice of the omnipotent chef: that a success like Mario (or a Marco Pierre White or an Alain Ducasse) can create a restaurant so perfectly in his own image that he doesn’t need to be there. The practice had been possible when Andy was in the kitchen, but Andy believed he had a Mario-like sci-fi operating system in his brain. Would his successor have the same implant?

  Memo, once the heir apparent, was no longer a contender: by leaving, he’d removed himself from consideration. But he wasn’t happy. “When you see Mario next,” Memo urged me, “tell him that I was asking after him. Will you do that for me?” Memo’s time at Naples 45 hadn’t got easier. To enhance the mood in the evening and persuade people to linger longer than the time it took to knock back a beer, eat a slice of pizza, and bolt for the train home, he wanted to put out votive candles (permission denied). He tried to prepare seasonal specials (permission denied) or make changes to the menu (permission denied). He was told that the restaurant was losing money, so he proposed reducing the overhead (proposals denied). “Someone in receivables”—and this was new, that Memo would have used a phrase like “someone in receivables”—had got a deal on a pasta, and Memo was instructed to cook with the new brand. (“It was, you know, okaaaay.”) Someone in receivables had got a good price on twelve-ounce steaks from Kansas, and Memo was told that this was the meat he would now serve. “This was not okay,” he said (and added, without explanation, “kickbacks”). Someone in receivables had got a supply of lobsters; a European beer. One day Memo was visited by Peter Wyss, a vice president of Restaurant Associates.

  “Is this working for you?” he asked.

  As Memo, a big guy, recalled the exchange, he puffed up, inflating himself with indignation, as I’m sure he did at the time, repeating the question in a fury of ironies, inflections in all the wrong places. Or else in all the right places if the objective was to convey to Mr. Wyss that he was a little man who knew diddly shit about cooking—which may or may not have been the case but, conventionally, is not a message you send to your boss. “Is THIS working for ME?” Memo boomed and went on to itemize the ways in which THIS was NOT working, not only for him but also for the restaurant. Mr. Wyss thought the restaurant had been perfectly fine the way it was, and Memo was out of a job. Maybe, he thought, it was time to return to a four-star restaurant run by one of those “French pricks”—Thomas Keller, the chef of The French Laundry in California, was opening up a place—and Memo phoned Mario for advice, wondering if he would recommend the career move, but the call was never returned. “He was probably away,” Memo said.

  Memo was thirty. “I’ve got time,” he said—a chef’s career takes years. “What I’d really like is a small place, thirty to forty covers, preparing the food of my childhood—a Mexican Pó.”

  In this, Memo was like just about every other chef at Babbo, falling irretrievably for the idealized-hole-in-the-wall-neighborhood-restaurant myth of Pó, which punishingly entered their heads as a tantalizing vision they then spent years hoping to realize—one day, when they had the money, when they had a partner. Memo already had a Pó-rhyming name. It had occurred to him years before, just after he’d finished the service at Le Cirque. “Ajo,” he said. Spanish for garlic. “It came to me at three in the morning, when I was on the bus to Harlem, going home. Ajo. Very small. Very intimate.”

  Tony Liu was not a contender for Andy’s job. He and Frankie were the two sous-chefs, but Frankie had seniority. But in Tony’s view, neither he nor Frankie was qualified, and the position should go to someone from outside. “Frankie,” he told me, “is good with food but bad with people. I am completely against his being appointed, which I told Mario.” Tony was the least volatile person in the kitchen—even-mannered, understated, no tantrums. His objection to Frankie seemed out of character. Besides, what would happen if Mario ignored the advice—would Tony resign? But Tony had also become the informal representative of the kitchen and felt a responsibility to express the kitchen’s position. He was seen as the only levelheaded senior person, and, at some point, everyone had summoned him to the walk-in for an out-of-earshot, out-of-sight impromptu meeting to deal with the most recent display of Frankie’s increasingly high-handed behavior.

  “It was called the ‘F Factor,’” Tony explained. “And I was always in the middle. Frankie would have one of his tirades. They were always very personal. And the victim would appeal to me for help. For a while, I tried to talk to Frankie, but you can only have that kind of conversation so many times. Frankie didn’t like to talk.”

  Holly was the most affected. Since I’d witnessed her hiring, she had worked every station and was now an accomplished cook, but she had regular run-ins with Frankie. “He was always on Holly,” Tony said. “I don’t know why. Maybe it was just a case of Frankie’s having a bad day, but Frankie was having a lot of bad days. He was abusive, and Holly could take only so much, and then she’d want to talk it out. Frankie refused: not during service, or after, or ever.” One feature of the F Factor, evidently, was the silent treatment. “This was a five-year-old’s behavior. ‘No! I’m not talking to you. Na, na, na, na, na.’” In Tony’s eyes, the kitchen was degenerating dangerously. “You had Gina in one corner and Elisa in the other, and in between you were going to put Frankie in charge? How was that a good idea? The place was already so moody—so up and down, so many tantrums. I wanted to shout at all of them, Gina, Elisa, Frankie. ‘Hey, guys, don’t you know how to act like adults?’”

  Did Mario know what the kitchen was like without him? According to Tony, “Mario knows exactly what he doesn’t want to know.”

  What he did know was that Frankie was an exceptional, dazzling cook. No one else was so fast or so instinctual. I found him exhilarating to watch. He was not cerebral, like Andy. There was no chatter about a computer chip. Frankie didn’t think or talk—language was a burden, an impediment to speed. For Frankie, cooking was a physical feat: he had Mario’s food, and how to prepare it, memorized. It was in his muscles. What more did Mario need to know? Besides, he never saw the Frankie experienced by the kitchen because Frankie was never that person in Mario’s company. When Mario was around, Frankie changed. He drooped, sloping his shoulders, or else bowed his head, his chin somewhere south of his collarbone, avoiding eye contact, deferential, his posture reinforcing the status of who was in charge.

  “Frankie’s the man,” Joe had taken to saying, and Frankie was duly made executive chef.

  Garland was the first to go. I ran into him one afternoon around four o’clock, the kitchen twilight hour. This was when all the city’s restaurants stop, all at the same time. Once I’d been educated in the moment, I started seeing New York in a new way, a restaurant city shutting down, one shift handing over to the next, the relay between prep and service, both crews relaxing together, gathered unceremoniously in their soiled coats and sweaty bandannas for a family meal around the best table in the house, or by the service door, or on a stoop, smoking a cigarette or catching the day’s last light before returning to the hot boxy space where they would spend the next ten hours. Garland was leaning against a wall of a new Mexican restaurant off Union Square, owned by a former boss: the jo
b offer, running the place, had come up just when Frankie took over. “I didn’t leave only because of Frankie—this is a good job—but I would have left anyway.” Garland was happy and, according to the Gina edict, had, like everyone else who leaves Babbo, promptly lost twenty pounds. “There’s not a lot of butter in Mexican food.”

  Holly was next. She packed up and went to Italy. She had saved some money and wanted to make food with Italians and be reminded of why she was a cook.

  Then Alex. He had lasted eleven months. But by leaving before a full year was out, he deprived himself of a job reference from Mario. Alex knew the rule, although he openly wondered what possible reference Mario would have written: according to Alex, Mario hadn’t been in the kitchen when Alex was there. (In fact Mario had been in the kitchen, but Alex had been too panicked to notice.) But Alex, a congenital optimist, had identified positive things in his Babbo experience, including his relationship with Frankie. “For instance, Frankie taught me a method that was new to me for making spaghetti alla carbonara,” Alex said happily. “You render your guanciale, and make a sauce with it and the egg whites, and then, after you’ve plated it, you add your yolks, uncooked. That’s just one example of how Frank turned out to be such a great guy—that he took time out of his busy day to show me how to make this carbonara, even if it was in the form of his yelling at me.”

  The yelling, too, was not without its life lessons. “When Frankie was abusing me, he was always doing it for a reason. He was trying to make me a better cook. I also found the abuse was good for me, because I learned what kind of person I don’t want to be. When I become a sous-chef, I now know I’m not going to conduct myself in this way. I have Frankie to thank for that insight.” He paused, taking in the enormity of the influence. “We’ve had our differences, but Frankie is now my best buddy.”

  Tony quit. “I didn’t want to be a member of Frankie’s kitchen.” He was hired to run a new restaurant in the West Village, a fifty-seater (“not much larger than Pó,” in Tony’s predictable description), called August (no one knew why), dedicated to European food—an elusive idea, but the perfect next place for Tony. In his mind, he’d done French, Spanish, and Italian. Now he could learn Belgian dishes, the occasional German one. The menu, when I ate there later, was like a concoction of a European Union bureaucrat—a little something for everyone (a sauerkraut dish alongside one made with chorizo)—but the food was good because Tony was a good cook. When Holly returned, Tony asked her to be the sous-chef. “I prefer working with women. There is so much less testosterone bravura.”

  By the time Abby quit (there would be no women left working service), the evacuation was complete: a cook from every station had left. In the five-year history of the restaurant, such a wholesale emptying had never occurred. The situation was urgent, and a sous-chef was hired from outside—quickly, without Frankie’s being consulted: a mistake because Frankie refused to work with him.

  “I worry about Frank,” Memo told me. “He’s so unhappy. He’s so angry. Something’s going to happen.”

  What? I wondered. I didn’t find out until much later, because I had my own demons and had to leave New York to deal with them.

  APPRENTICE

  About the time of Tiberius, there lived a man named Apicius—very rich and luxurious—for whom several cheesecakes called “Apician” are named. He lived chiefly in Minturae, a city of Campania, and spent many drachmas on his belly, especially on very expensive crawfish, a local speciality that was bigger than those of Smyrna and even than those of Alexandria. On hearing that the crawfish in Africa were also very good, he sailed there without delay, leaving that very day. The voyage was difficult and he suffered exceedingly. Before he reached the shore, he was greeted by the local fishermen who approached him in their boats, offering him some of their very fine crawfish (the news of his visit had created a great stir among the Africans). But when Apicius saw the crawfish, he asked if there were any finer, and when he was told that these were the finest available, he recalled the crawfish of Minturnae, turned his ship round without disembarking, and returned to Italy.

  —ATHENAEUS, third century A.D.

  19

  I’D CONCLUDED I needed to return to Italy and be there properly: for a long time. Actually, I had no idea how long—a stint, or two stints, or more (how long is a stint, anyway?), long enough to stop a feeling that continued to haunt me, that I would never have this opportunity again. Mark Barrett knew the feeling: it was why, having completed his time with Gianni and Betta (his first stint), he was now zigzagging across the peninsula in Mario’s footsteps, from restaurant to restaurant (Bologna, Florence, Calabria), hoping to learn as much as he could. Mark was hoping to be away for years. I couldn’t go away for years (or could I?), but I knew I had to get back to Italy for a length of time, whatever it might be, or else I’d end up regretting it for the rest of my life. I was in a state. I’d experienced this kind of haunting a year earlier, before I had quit my job and taken up a spot on the line in the Babbo kitchen. Now, feeling it again, I found myself trying to persuade my wife that what she really wanted to do was quit her job as well (Jessica was a highly paid Manhattan magazine editor) and accompany me to an Italian hill town where we would know nobody and where I’d work really long hours for no money—if I was lucky and someone took me on, and if I then managed to be put in a position where I’d actually learn something. (I did not want to go to Italy to perfect my carrot-chopping technique.)

  Jessica considered the proposal. “Haven’t we just been to Italy?” she asked.

  “Well, yes, it’s true, a good point. We have just been to Italy.”

  “And didn’t you learn how to make tortellini?”

  “Well, yes, that’s true, too.” But tortellini was only one dish, and I’d become convinced that there were culinary secrets—an attitude, a touch, the thing that Mario was always saying that you can learn only “over there”—that I needed to discover. That was why we had to go back.

  Jessica took this in. (It was a testing moment in the marriage.) “And who exactly is going to tell you these secrets?”

  So I told her about Dario Cecchini: he, I’d become convinced, was the person I should work for. He didn’t know me, and I had no idea if he’d take me on. But there were already so many connections between us: he had to take me on! When Mario’s father, Armandino Batali, quit his job at Boeing and decided to learn how Italians prepared meat, he went first to Dario’s butcher shop for instruction. I phoned Armandino and asked him why. Because Dario was the most highly regarded butcher in Italy, he said, and because his shop wasn’t simply a butcher shop but a museum of Tuscan cooking: raw and cooked meat, cuts of Chianti beef along with ragùs and sauces and cured porks—a university of the zona.

  I also knew about Dario from Elisa. In the summers she conducted a weeklong cooking class nearby and visited Dario’s for inspiration. (She kept a picture of him by her station in the Babbo kitchen.)

  And the food writer Faith Willinger had discovered fennel pollen at Dario’s, the stuff she secreted into her luggage and smuggled across the Atlantic, which was then sprinkled atop Mario’s tortelloni. On one of Willinger’s trips to the United States—the twenty-fifth anniversary party of Chez Panisse—she’d also brought the butcher with her, a visit that had been reported in the International Herald Tribune, which, coincidentally, I had torn out and saved: it described Cecchini as the most famous butcher in the world.

  I phoned. Signore Cecchini, I said, I am a friend of Mario Batali.

  “Accidenti!” he declared (which seems to mean something like “Well, I’ll be damned!” but what did I know?).

  Mario, as you know, is the son of Armandino, I said, reading from a piece of prepared text. (Italian telephones scared the jeebers out of me—I’d been rehearsing my questions all morning long.)

  “Accidenti!”

  He is also a friend of Faith Willinger.

  “Accidenti!”

  And I would like to learn how to be a Tuscan
butcher.

  “Accidenti! Vieni! Pronto! Ora!”—Come! Quickly! Now!

  Then Dario passed the phone to a woman who introduced herself as his wife, Ann Marie, and who, thankfully, was an American and able to confirm my understanding of the exchange I’d just had. One week later, there I was, on a Sunday, crossing the busy Chiantigiana, the hill highway that runs the length of Chianti, from Florence to Siena, and cuts through the middle of Panzano, and experiencing a feeling I’d had when I walked into the Babbo kitchen for the first time: that I would be a different person when my stay here was completed, but I had no idea how.

  DARIO’S BUTCHER shop, the macelleria, was on a steep street next to the post office. Actually, it was two shops joined together. The lower one was like a family sitting room (or, more precisely, the sitting room of a family that lives with its animals). There were a dining table with chairs, a bookcase, a bust of Dante, and a ceramic fountain (the kind cows drink water from). There were also a menacing set of black spikes (entitled “Welcome to Tuscany”) and a papier-mâché depiction of something—of people, I’d discover, life-size, disappearing into the flames of Hell. The upper shop, where the wares were displayed, was impossible to get into. There was a crush of people: inside, in the doorway, on the sidewalk, spilling into the street. How many? A hundred? More? They were sweaty and excited. I stood on my tiptoes. Someone had a television camera on his shoulder. There were flashing bulbs. I could hear loud choral music of what I thought might be Mozart’s “Requiem.” (Why a requiem? Then again, it’s a butcher’s shop: why not a requiem?)